Accessing partitions in drive images

[Michael ODonnell]

> Anything old will have its share of historical accidents, to be
> sure.  But there's reasonable design failings, and then there's
> design by the infinite monkey method.

You have insulted an infinite number of monkeys.  IBM used to
publish the source codes for their BIOS in the little 3-ring
binder full of docs they supplied with each PeeCee.  Let's be
charitable and just say that they were clear evidence that
the author(s) had little (if any) experience with assembler
language programming or the 8088 architecture.  At best (we
surmised at the time) they were an attempt to more or less
blindly translate fragments of CP/M code from 8080 to 8088.
Naturally, that glop was enshrined as a global standard...